Acer C720 Chromebook is the cheapest Haswell laptop you can buy

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Acer’s C7, currently the 7th best selling laptop on Amazon.com, has been a hit. Starting at $200, the laptop brought serious value to the entry level segment and was one of better budget buys available, so long as you were fine with the limitations of Google’s Chrome OS and the tradeoffs inherent in a $200 computer.

The C7 (technically the C710) was introduced in late 2012 but was revised in June 2013, moving from a 320GB hard drive to a 16GB SSD. After a successful year — though not as successful as that of Samsung’s $250 ARM-powered Chromebook — the C7 is being replaced with Acer’s Haswell-powered C720.

The $250 C720-2800 Chromebook specs haven’t changed much, with the main update being a move to a 1.4GHz Intel Celeron 2955U processor. This should bump the battery life up to an impressive 8.5 hours without having to resort to the ARM chip found in the Samsung Series 3 or HP’s new Chromebook. The 11.6-inch (1366×768) anti-glare display is back for the C720, as is the 16GB SSD. The laptop runs 4GB of low-power RAM (DDR3L), uses Intel’s HD graphics, dual-band 802.11n WiFi, an SD reader, and Bluetooth 4.0. Ports include one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, and HDMI. Also included is 100GB of Google Drive storage for two years.

We’ve known for a few weeks now that new Chromebooks were on the way (from Acer, HP, Toshiba, and Asus) and that some would be powered by Intel chips. In a prior statement Intel noted that while the CPU in the C720 is based on Haswell architecture, it’s not branded as Haswell because it’s Celeron, not a full-on Core model. This is a distinction that only the smallest amount of buyers in the sub-$300 laptop market will care about, but the main difference is that premium Core features — Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost, AVX, and AES-NI — have been deactivated in Celeron. Even so, the C720 will be the first Chromebook with a Haswell chip in it.

The C720 measures in at 11.34 x 8.03 x 0.75 inches and is 0.75 inches thick, marking a 30% reduction compared to the prior model.

No release date has been announced, but the pre-order page has been posted on Amazon where the C720 is $240.